The Truth

Returning to Sothmere

The true nature of the Shadowmoss

8

JAN/12

When Tulkas cooked the bugs some strange little creatures appeared. They came close to the pot, in which he cooked the bugs.

Then they started to sing a strange and sad song, we thought at first that there was no fire elemental and that we had failed, but Olek was sure that those little Creatures were the Fire elementals, so we followed them and came to a cave. Soon we found a big chamber inside the cave and inside it the Guardian who was watching the precious Shadowmoss, the final ingredient we needed to save the lives of the innocent Townspeople who were suffering the Amber Rage due to the raging Babarians. But we landed a few good hits and neutralized it within a minute.

We started exploring the caverns in which the Guardian lived, Leoncio found a shortsword dating back to the Tevintean Empire. I wonder how it ended up in there.

However soon we found a room with the same agonizing smell as the bugsoup, which Tulkas had cooked to bait the elementals. And in there it was, the Shadowmoss. Well actually it appeared as if this so called Shadowmoss was not actually any kind of moss. It apeared to be… well the extrementitious matter of the giant Snake. Why do the people even call it ShadowMOSS? If anyone just told us that we are looking for the manure of the giant snake we would probably have been… nicer to this guardian snake. The worst thing is that the elementals seem to eat it. This is on the one hand disgusting and on the other hand very unfortunate becouse the Snake is deceased now. But wait could it even be only one snake? Were did it come from there have to be brothers and sisters somewere! We should bring this cognition home, in the hope that the next Adventurers will be better informed.

We are on our way back and somthing incredible happened. We found one of the infectet in a kind of trap-hole. When Leoncio investigated it the infected threw a dagger and Leoncio got himself infected now. Well I tried to comfort him and told him that I had already made a plan to get the moss back to the ill, in the quite probable case that the garrison was under siege from the barbarians, which would require him to get infected nevertheless. It somehow didn’t seem to make him mouch happier though.

On our way back to Sothmere we had another encounter. A group of people waited for us in some hills. When their leader, a rider on his horse, wanted to negotiate with us we asked him why his men were hiding and he told him to get out of their hideouts. He told us his story: His village was attacked by the infected barbarians and they have some injured who are contaminated by the deadly grip of the Amber Rage. Unlike the people of Sothmere the inhabitants of his village have actually the guts to take their chances and try to rescue the ill. Unfortunatly we couldn’t hand them over our Shadowmoss. We came to an agreement with them. We gave them some of the potions which could not heal, but delay the Amber Rage and a description how to find the cave. We also told them, that we had taken the moss of one chamber, but that it could be quite probable that their would be other chambers with more of it. We also told him that they could come to Sothmere and if we had some leftovers of our medicine we would relinquish it to him.

Yet another encounter has slowed down our march for Sothmere and this was a really preposterous one. We met some guards from Sothmere. One could expect that this would be a quite pleasant greating for us. We were the mighty saviours of the circle, who arrived with the Shadowmoss, a rare igredient of old legends, to rescue their people from certain death, weren’t we?

But no, of course those crazy people were not there to be our honour guard, ok their claim was that they were there to hunt some infected barbarians, which they had routed before, what actually would be a quite good reason to be out there, too. They were out for our heads of course! Richta commanded them to finish us off and destroy the Shadowmoss, should we succeed, what we did of course, and were following those orders blindly like the brainless minions they are.

We were not really prepared for an attack so this battle was quite hard but we overwhelmed them. When we questioned them they spit everything out and told us all we needed to know of Richtas woebegone excuse for an plan. Richta was planing to burn the ill on stakes to demonstrate his power so he could take over the position of the mayor. Truly despicable and outright stupid.

We decided to let Fiala and Olek by our prisoners and head on to Sothmere as fast as Alistair could get me there.

We finally got to Sothmere and the situation was grim indeed. Richta and his man were preparing the stakes and just about to burn those poor souls. I had my great appearance and charged him with the crimes he had commited and was about to commit. And after his braindead minions had made their testimony, no one was questioning the correctness of my truth. Richta got what he deserved and was burned on one of the stakes on which he planed to burn an innocent life to show of his power.

Unfortunatly we had only enogh medcine to cure the ill of Sothmere and one extra for the brave men and women of the other village. If they don’t find their own moss they will have an tough choice…
But we had no time to wait in Sothmere, we had no chance to notify the circle that we would have to take this… detour. So we decided to embark with the first ray of the morning sun.

We are back in the Circle and our Journey was a fortunate one. No bandits or worse were preying on us. The only people worth of notice we met were a delegation of mages with their templar guardians. They were on their quest to Ostergar, where they will fight and slay the darkspawn.

Now we are back and have been debriefed by Irving and Gregoir. Irving appeared to be pleased with my decision to help those people. Gregoir seemed not to be as pleased with the effort of Tulkas as Irving was with mine. He made Tulkas write his report until tommorow a quite outrageous task, given that it was already evening when we arrived. Tulkas, trying to accomplish this task came to me with an even more outrageous request. He actually asked if he could borrow my Journal to finish his stupid report in time. Of course I refused. Actually I ended up helping him with the writing of his report all night long, but I have doubts that it is really allowed for the mage who is beeing overwatched to tell her guardian what he should write in his report…